SEVEN

Germany: Fifty Years Later

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

— WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Early in the writing of our stories, Bernie and I planned a trip to Germany for spring 1997 as a way to complete our recall of the past. We decided that our trip should start in the Austrian city of Mauthausen and the forest near Gunskirchen where Bernie had nearly died at the end of World War II. We met at the Dom Hotel in nearby Linz. Somehow it surprised me to see Bernie move around Austria with the same self-assurance that he had at home in California. I felt an unfamiliar twinge of self-consciousness at being with Bernie in German-speaking Europe.

In the morning we drove east along the north bank of the Danube through the peaceful, green Austrian landscape toward the Mauthausen concentration camp, now a museum. It stands on top of a hill behind the small town—a cold, gray, forbidding prison with massive stone walls. You enter through a large gate that displays a round opening near the top of its arch, where a swastika had supported the eagle of the Third Reich more than half a century earlier. Sally and I were confused for a moment to see the letters “KLM” displayed at the entrance, as if the Dutch airline were advertising at this locale, until Bernie explained that in this case it stood, of course, for Konzentrationslager Mauthausen. He said he had found it amusing after he learned what those initials meant to the rest of the world.

A ticket booth manned by an Austrian government employee is located well within the walls in front of the barracks area. I found it perverse that Bernie should have to pay to revisit the camp where he nearly died. As a matter of fact, why wasn't this monument free of charge to everyone? Why shouldn't the Austrian government pay to maintain it? I tried to persuade Bernie that he already had paid his entrance fee years earlier and that we demand free admission for him now, but he wouldn't hear of it. At least Sally and I insisted on paying for him. Bernie suggested with a grin that he and I take advantage of the senior discount, which we did. At 10 schillings, the fee was less than a dollar.

Once inside the barracks area of Mauthausen, you face a huge elongated asphalt square framed by long rows of parallel one-story barracks on the left and a row of larger buildings on the right. This area, nearly empty in the morning sun and stretching about half a kilometer to the far end, reminded me of the Nazi rally site in Nuremberg. Both spaces had been designed to move human beings around easily—to mold the masses, as Hitler had said.

Bernie's barracks, block 21, was no longer there, but others remained and were open to visitors. We entered one, and Bernie pointed out some typical features: the narrow wooden bunk-bed frames on which four people shared a platform hardly large enough for one, the round stone washbasins installed between sleeping quarters, the hooks for hanging clothes. Outside, he showed us the chimneys of the kitchen and crematorium, one not very far away from the other. Many other camera-toting tourists had purchased tickets and roamed through the barracks and the museum and past the memorial statues. Now, of course, the camp provided well-marked, clean rest rooms, but it went too far, I thought, in providing an on-site café, which we shunned. I felt like shouting out to the strangers around us that there was someone here who had been an inmate fifty years ago. But Bernie would not have liked that kind of attention. He was engaged in his own search.

In front of a glass vitrine that displayed a pile of identification bands—some of them crude, provided by the Nazi authorities, and others more artistic, fashioned by the inmates themselves—I noticed Bernie fingering the glasses case that hung from a belt loop at his side throughout most of our trip. From it he retrieved his reading glasses to get a better look at the displayed identification tags. Now he stared intently at the contents of the vitrine. He tried to locate, by some wild chance, the bracelet with the number 103,705 that he had lost, the one that the silversmith inmate had fashioned for him, but to no avail.

We moved on to the kitchen in which he had worked for several weeks. Then he led us across the area where the dreaded morning Appell took place during all types of weather, even on the coldest winter days. We asked Bernie what the prisoners did during the day after roll call if they weren't working in the kitchen or the quarry. He said, “Nothing. We just milled around.” I realized that this contrasted with his description of his days at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I had once compared the devastation he felt on Betsy's death to the depression he must have felt in Auschwitz, but he objected to the use of the term “depression.” Whereas he fell into a depression after the death of his wife, he actually experienced a near-absence of emotions at Auschwitz, because there was no time to reflect. His days there were filled with “ducking, weaving, and motions to stay alive.”

In the auditorium next to the museum, we watched a graphically detailed film about the history of the camp and its horrors: for example, stripping and chaining prisoners to a wall outside the barracks and hosing them with cold water before leaving them to freeze to death overnight in winter. These bodies were frozen stiff and encased in ice the next morning. The film also documents one of the messages scrawled on the wall of an isolation cell: “If there were a God, he'd have to beg forgiveness of me.” After the film, we slowly made our way out toward the quarry, located a short distance from the barracks. As we walked, Bernie mentioned how he hated to take showers at Mauthausen. Once a week the inmates were marched naked, no matter how cold the weather, to the showers in another building. The water was usually cold; but once in a while it was lukewarm. He showed us a small scar on his right hand from a “cold sore,” as he called it, that wouldn't heal while he was at Mauthausen. He had avoided seeing the camp doctor about it for fear he would have been sent to the hospital, from which many never returned.

Bernie remarked about the balmy spring weather and the beauty of the idyllic landscape that we could see all around us outside the concentration camp walls. He was always struck, while a camp inmate, by the unbelievable contrast between the picturesque landscape just outside and the horrendous suffering within. As we approached the quarry steps on rough cobblestone pavement, Bernie admonished Sally and me not to stumble. I recalled his account of the day he had been assigned to this sadistic hell.

Once we reached the bottom of the quarry, the sheer stone cliffs surrounding it seemed hopelessly high. We knew from the film that some inmates had committed suicide by leaping from the cliffs, to smash against the walls or to drown in the ponds below, while others had been murdered when guards forced inmates to push each other off of them. It was an uncanny setting on this muggy day in late spring—brownish ponds, reddish cliffs, lush vegetation. We were the only tourists to have descended the stairs at the time. Unlike the camp above on the plateau, it was not an ugly place. But it is one you don't want to remain in very long, for fear that the walls could close in on you. I wondered what voices might echo back from the cliffs if one were to start shouting. As we headed back toward the steps to climb out of the quarry, Bernie reiterated what the film had said —that during the war there had been a different number of steps because they had been built of uneven heights to make the work of carrying stones up them more grueling. He recalled them as having been narrower, so that when one prisoner toppled down backward, he couldn't help but take others with him. This cruelty had been a deliberate part of the original design.

Bernie and I slowly ascended the safer, reconstructed steps together, counting in silence. We fell into a lockstep, as if we wanted to invent our own wordless commemorative ritual. When we reached the top and he said, “Hey, we made it,” we both had to laugh. And we both had counted 186 steps. Leaving the camp felt like crossing an invisible border between the past and the present, between the camp and the gentle Austrian hills. History has marked off this place of horror forever, even though there is now no transitional space between the inside and the outside.

We continued east along the Danube past the bright village center of Mauthausen. All of us felt the need for some comic relief to shake the oppression of the evil place we had just left. I quipped that Bernie had obviously lived on the “wrong side of the tracks” during his stay in Mauthausen. If he had only resided in “lower Mauthausen” and not “upper Mauthausen,” he would have been all right. We were amused and scandalized at the same time to note the prominent golden arches of a McDonald's restaurant at the edge of the village, and Bernie asked to stop so that he could photograph the “McDonald's Mauthausen” sign. And we, in turn, took a picture of him taking the picture.

That afternoon, we traced in our car the path of the Death March between Mauthausen and the village of Gunskirchen, the four-day march during which half the concentration camp inmates perished. We knew that those who dropped or straggled behind had been executed. Now Bernie told us that he, like most of the others on the trek, did not look back to watch the executions, but they all heard the shots. When a family member or buddy stayed with someone who fell, they heard two shots.

Now we drove on well-paved roads beyond Wels, one of the towns they had passed on the way to their final destination in the pine forest of Gunskirchen. Wels, with its car lots adorned with colorful flags, has grown so that it is now merged with Gunskirchen. We paused at the church that still stands in the center of Gunskirchen across from the Hansel und Gretel Brautmoden boutique that displays bridal gowns in its window. From there, we drove out of the village center and crossed the main road to enter the pine forest where Bernie remembered the camp to have been located.

The forest was honeycombed with small paths and dirt roads partially overgrown with vegetation. An occasional clearing strewn with old rotted logs and a new growth of trees allowed for a glimpse into deeper parts of the forest. We parked the car and started to search on foot, to forage around for telltale signs that might remain of the tragedy that had unfolded there over half a century ago during the last weeks of the war. But nothing was left of the makeshift camp of prefabricated barracks. Or perhaps we couldn't find the exact site. (Recently, we met a Czech survivor of the Death March who told us that a small memorial has been erected near the site; but we did not find it.) No voices from the past echoed in the trees—the desperate father who died after having devoured his son's meager rations, the old woman who shared her last scrap of food with a young boy, the corpses piled on corpses, the SS guards who administered arsenic to the remaining victims—all were gone. No traces remained. We only heard the wind in the trees. This absence, this nothingness increased our determination to find something, anything, that would allow us to link the past with the present. So we carefully retraced our steps and drove deeper into the forest, until the road narrowed and almost vanished in the underbrush where branches scraped the sides of our car so badly that we feared getting stuck altogether, or at least ruining the paint job. So, with Sally at the wheel while Bernie and I held the strongest branches away from the car, we slowly backed out of our trap, and out of the pine forest of Gunskirchen altogether. Bernie laughed, “Well, we got through that scrape too.” It was getting late in the day, so we decided to return to Linz. This forest, filled with horror for Bernie, revealed nothing more to our eyes —all the more reason to tell our stories.

Back in Linz that evening, we wandered through the town center in search of a restaurant, stopping here and there to read the posted menus. At one point we entered an inner courtyard with an open-air restaurant, where a youth orchestra entertained a crowd of diners. As it finished playing a Viennese waltz, an athletic young man, about twenty years old, appeared out of nowhere, dressed in a sweat suit and running shoes. He stationed himself in front of the band, raised his hand in the Nazi salute, and barked with military precision, “Im Namen des Fuhrers!” (In the name of the Führer!). The crowd fell silent. After his verbal assault, the young brute pranced provocatively from table to table with a hostile smirk on his face. No one stirred, but an older corpulent man standing next to me muttered in German, “Swine!” We left the disturbing scene to search elsewhere for a place to eat. In my mind, I pitted this neo-Nazi thug against a young man of his generation whom Sally and I briefly encountered on our way to Linz to meet Bernie: a father on roller blades, a Walkman on his head, a knapsack full of groceries on his back, pushing a baby stroller containing his infant down the sidewalk. Friendly and curious, he was happy to give directions to two foreigners —just outside the town of Dachau.

Our trip to Austria and Germany, which was to last a week, had been carefully planned. It was Bernie's first trip to Germany. On his other trips abroad, Germany had never been on his itinerary except as a transit stop at the Frankfurt airport. But since I had been to his village of Tab in southern Hungary, we agreed he should visit my village of Kleinheubach on the Main River. And, since the wall separating Germany and Europe into two parts had crumbled and Germany was unified, we were all curious to take a glimpse at Berlin, its future and its past. We realized that as Berlin becomes Germany's new capital, the concern Thomas Mann articulated after World War II takes on new relevance—whether the future will be shaped by a European Germany or a German Europe.

As we crossed the border into Germany, I wondered how Bernie felt. We were discussing contemporary American politics, and he seemed more engrossed than I in our conversation. Content to stay in the right lane, we joined the high-speed race on the Autobahn in the direction of Kleinheubach. On the way we passed by Nuremberg, with its old Nazi rally parade grounds and its former tribunal where the top Nazi criminals were convicted after the war. For Bernie, Nuremberg had an ominous ring, but I have always liked the city. For him, it was the city of Gothic tales, predating Nazism; for me, it was the big city of my youth where my favorite cousin lived.

Although its population has doubled in size since World War II to more than three thousand, my childhood village is not set up for tourism. So we stayed nearby in an idyllic resort hotel, the Paradeismühle (Paradise Mill) in the Spessart mountains. I debated with myself about whether to mention to Bernie that these pine-and beech-covered mountains played a role in the medieval German heroic epic of the Nibelungs. This is where the perfidious Hagen is said to have stabbed Siegfried, the Germanic hero, in the back, giving rise to the stab-in-the-back mythology that was so important in the Nazi ideology about the Third Reich and its “cowardly” enemies. Our peaceful, two-night abode nestled in the forest displayed six flags of neighboring European countries and really had nothing to do with Germanic myths. And, after all, except for students of German medieval literature or the music of Richard Wagner, who cares anymore about these connotations that crowded in on me? Perhaps I should have mentioned them just the same, but I felt it to be too one-sided an introduction to contemporary Germany.

Unlike our slow walk through Tab a few years earlier, I first showed Bernie my village from the car, with brief stops at the blacksmith's shop, my grandmother's house, the English gardens of the baroque castle, the Main River, the village walls, and the ochre-colored Protestant church, where in my youth I had suffered through many a long-winded sermon during Sunday morning services. The pulpit was still adorned with the same gold-trimmed, white pelican who opens her breast to feed her young with her own blood. Nothing had changed in this church since my childhood. A stone plaque on the wall still lists the names of the village men who died in World War I. There is no stone plaque for those who died in World War II. Constructed in the late Middle Ages and never destroyed, the church stands on level ground. The bells were removed during World War II for the purpose of turning them into cannons, but it never came to this. After the war, they were returned intact to the bell tower. Not far from the Protestant church, near the river, I showed Bernie the various high-water markings that indicated flood levels of the Main River over the centuries.

I was able to show Bernie numerous places where my early life, the life of my family and its friends and acquaintances, was inscribed, tangible evidence of a human geography that continued to the present day, in spite of the twentieth century's upheavals. By contrast, during our visit to Tab, Bernie had been able to show us only a few sites from his past, as he came up against closed gates, razed houses, and the crumbling steps that no longer led to the synagogue where he had sobbed and prayed. Only the train station and gravestone inscriptions in the grass-covered cemetery provided tangible links to all he had been forced to leave behind in 1944.

The nephew of my stepmother Zink, Manfred Zink, had arranged for us to meet with both the former and the current mayors of Kleinheubach in the town hall (Rathaus). Just the year before, in 1996, the former mayor, Bernhard Holl, published the two-part history of the Jewish community in Kleinheubach from 1677 to 1942 on which I have relied for historical background material in these memoirs. Together with the current mayor, Kurt Schüssler, we toured the town hall and met some of his colleagues.

Both mayors accompanied us on a walk through the village and showed us the reconstructed facade of the synagogue in the Judengasse, which had been ransacked during the Kristallnacht of 1938. Herr Holl gave us some historical background. Following the Kristallnacht, the fanatic Ortsgruppenleiter had reported the destruction of the synagogue to his superiors in Miltenberg as an act of the “seething soul of the people” (ein Opfer der kochenden Volksseele). Then, in 1940, the village purchased what was left of the synagogue for 600 reichsmarks and used it to store fire department equipment and a hearse.¹ Although it later came into private ownership, it was eventually declared a historical monument, and public moneys were used to restore the roof and facade to their condition before the Kristallnacht. The inscription in Hebrew over the door now reads, “This is the door to God…. The righteous should enter.”

From the synagogue, we walked to the restored Mikva (bathhouse) that Kleinheubach Jews had used for purification rituals. It had been conveniently constructed next to the brook that ran from the nearby mountains, then along the edge of the village and down to the Main River. One of a very few extant Mik-vas in Bavaria, public moneys also restored this protected monument. It was dedicated during a Kristallnacht memorial ceremony on November 9, 1992, commemorating the Jewish victims of Nazi violence. A red sandstone marker carries the star of David and a German inscription: “To the victims of National Socialism and of all forms of tyranny” (Den Opfern des Nationalsozialismus und aller Gewaltherrschaft). We also visited the old schoolhouse of the once-thriving Jewish community and found that it, too, had been restored. Then we drove up to the Jewish cemetery, where 485 Jews have their last resting place, witness to centuries of Jewish life in the Main valley.

Bernie and his German namesake, Bernhard, the former mayor, made their way through the rows of graves. About 186 stone markers were still standing; the rest have deteriorated or sunk into the ground or were used for new grave plates. On the backside of the upright stones are inscriptions in German, while the fronts carry names and dates in Hebrew that Bernie deciphered for Herr Holl. Herr Holl pointed out the grave of the last Jewish inhabitant of Kleinheubach to be buried in this forest cemetery, Julius Sichel, who died on October 10,1941.

It was clear that this former mayor, who on our arrival introduced himself as a “German patriot,” saw the Jews who had lived in the village as an integral part of his own local heritage, as a source of pride. What he did not tell us was that a controversy had raged as to where to place the red sandstone that commemorated the victims of Nazism. Some villagers felt, as I found out later, that it should be placed in the main village square, others that it should be located near the Mikva. During its installation ceremony at the Mikva, police were present to prevent any potential neo-Nazi disturbances. Although to date none had occurred, Herr Holl confided to us that he feared vandalism there and in the Jewish cemetery. Were it to happen, an incident would besmirch the name of Kleinheubach, of which he is so proud, in newspaper reports “from Kiel to Konstanz,” as he put it. He went so far as to fret about the fact that some gravestones had sunk and tilted over time. If they were to topple over one day on their own, it might be mistaken for vandalism. We realized how hard it was for a citizen of goodwill, such as Bernhard Holl, to be a German patriot.

About fifty years old with curly red hair, the current mayor of Kleinheubach, Kurt Schüssler, belonged to a different generation of Germans than his predecessor. While respectful of Bernhard Holl's intense relation to village history, Herr Schüssler was primarily concerned with issues of the present. He talked to us about the governance of a contemporary German community on the local and regional levels, within the context of the modern democratic institutions that Germany has developed since World War II. His focus was clearly on translating grassroots issues into practical solutions. Bernie was quite taken with Herr Schüssler's presentation and, with his customary legal precision, posed myriad questions about the operational level of village governance that left the rest of us listening passively. Typical of his focus on the here and now, Bernie was just as interested in this information about the village's current infrastructure as in the touching ways in which the town memorialized its vanished Jewish community. When Bernie asked him about the chain of command from the federal level down to the local level, Herr Schüssler replied simply, “I'm the boss here,” meaning that he was not there just to take orders from above. With his evident expertise and quiet self-assurance, he was a good example of grassroots democracy in a country where power has become decentralized. This was as important to Bernie's assessment of Germans as any devotion they might show for the Jewish presence in the village's past. Here he found reassurance that there is little chance for a revival of Nazism on a grand scale.

We ended the day with a large meal at the Gasthaus zur schonen Aussicht, where, right after the war, villagers had discussed secession from Germany. Seated between the two mayors, Bernie tried manfully through the hours of eating and drinking to keep up with the conversation that lapsed at times into the local dialect. It was his first social event in Germany, and his German, though serviceable, was not always up to the brisk pace of the verbal interaction. Sally and I translated as much as we could, and after a couple of beers his German became more fluent.

At one point in the evening, knowing that I had started first grade in 1936, the proprietor of the inn produced a class photo taken in front of the grammar school in 1937 in which I was seated on the ground in the front row. I recognized most of the faces in the photo. Many of the children I still remembered by name, or at least I knew where they had lived in the village. I handed the photo across the table to Bernie and thought about his mournful examination of the glass vitrine at Mauthausen, where he searched in vain for his number on the displayed ID bracelets. It was not fair, of course, that I could share this photo from my youth in this familiar locale while he had nothing comparable to show from his childhood in Tab. We passed the faded picture around the table, and people remarked about what had happened to this or that person, but soon it was put away as the conversation moved on to other subjects. Several hours after it had begun, our merry party disbanded with warm farewells.

On the drive back to our resort hotel in the forest, Bernie marveled at the degree of continuity that existed in my life. My first reaction was to dispute it. I had emigrated, after all, as an eighteen-year-old to make my way in an American university and in an urban setting that bore no resemblance to the rural world I left behind. But Bernie countered that it was all a matter of degree and perspective. Fundamental breaks had characterized his life, and when he mentioned it in this context, I realized that I had never had to reinvent myself as totally as he was forced to do—from a boy in Tab to an orphan in death camps to a teenager in Italian refugee camps and, finally, to an adopted son in one of America's wealthiest families. I was completely taken aback when, as we said goodnight to him outside his room, he looked straight at me and said, “You know, that SS-Mauthausen entry of my arrival there on September 20, 1944, is the only written proof I have of my early life.”

Later, when I reflected on his comment, I realized how easy it had been for me to arrange a get-together with my childhood buddy Ludwig Bohn, who happened to be visiting his parents' house once when I also happened to be in Kleinheubach—this in contrast to the difficulties Bernie had finding Simcha during his trip to Israel. Some of Bernie's difficulties were of his own doing. Early in our memory work, in the first version of his reunion with Simcha, Bernie had only described the encounter itself. Later, another story regarding Simcha emerged, namely, of the barriers Bernie had to surmount before being able to locate his friend in Israel after almost fifty years. The trail leading back to Simcha had vanished. The Jewish agencies he contacted in the United States led nowhere. In Israel, he consulted the database at the Yad Vashem Museum but didn't come away with any concrete leads. He found an oral history of the Jewish children's survivor camp at Selvino, where he and Simcha had been taken after the war. Although Bernie recognized some of the names in this account, Simcha Katz was not among them. By coincidence, during his brief stay, Israeli television aired a documentary program on Selvino. A museum docent Bernie met had been so moved by this documentary and by this American visitor trying to locate his old Mauthausen and Selvino friend that she promised to do everything she could to help bring about their reunion. The docent managed to locate the widow of Moshe Z'iri, the Jewish leader of the Italian camp. Z'iri's widow consulted the archives of the Selvino group that Z'iri had kept unofficially and was able to locate Simcha, who lived in a small community near Tel Aviv. Thus the meeting was arranged. Had it not been for the documentary film and a determined museum employee, the contact between the two former concentration camp friends wouldn't have come to pass.

As we left Kleinheubach, Bernie said he was very impressed by what had been done in this corner of Germany to remember the past and the former Jewish inhabitants of the village. Bernhard Holl had given both of us copies of his recently published book on the history of Kleinheubach's Jewish community. This local history, along with the restoration of the synagogue, Mikva, and school, stood in sharp contrast to Tab, where, except for the abandoned cemetery, there is no trace of the hundreds of Jewish families who lived there for many generations. Bernie remarked with irony that, during his earlier postwar visits to Tab, its Christian citizens killed during World War II had been equally ignored. But since 1990 and the fall of communism in Hungary, that had changed, and a splendid monument now stood in the middle of the village honoring the fallen “heroes” of that war. As for the Jews, it is still as if there had never been any. Bernie came back to this point many times during our trip. The extent of Germany's interest in the Holocaust touched him, but he also thought that it was time now, fifty years after the war, with a different generation in charge, not to forget the past, but to move on.

The first night Bernie spent at the home of a German family was anything but routine. We had been invited for dinner and an overnight stay 50 kilometers up the Main River by Alfred-Ernst, Prince of Lowenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, and his wife, Princess Ruth-Erika, daughter of the Prussian Junker family von Buggenhagen. Our host happened to be a descendant of the Protestant branch of the house of Lowenstein, whose Catholic branch owned the Lowenstein castle and park down the Main River in Kleinheubach. In the eighteenth century, both houses had provided Schutzbriefe (letters of protection) for numerous local Jews that guaranteed them certain rights and freedoms, including residency, practice of trades and commerce, and participation in civic life. A Schutzbrief also constituted a warning to others not to assault the Jew's privileges or to mistreat him. These letters of protection were a common arrangement at the time for which protected Jews paid annual sums to the prince and obligated themselves not to provoke or seduce Christians or to utter blasphemies.²

As soon as we arrived in the late afternoon, the large, jovial Prince of Lowenstein ushered us through his baroque chateau to the parlor for a welcoming tea. I turned to Bernie at an opportune moment and asked him whether he had ever spent a night in such splendor. To my surprise, he replied that in its own way, Charles Merrill, Sr.'s mansion in Southampton was comparable.

Dinner, prepared by servants, was served in a spacious dining room. After eating, our hosts and their son and daughter-in-law strolled the expansive grounds with us and gave us a tour of their castle. When the zu Lowenstein's stately daughter-in-law sat down beneath a turn-of-the-century oil painting that portrayed two of her great-grandmothers, we felt time stand still through the generations. Quick as ever, Bernie volunteered the flattery that family beauty had survived throughout the century, while I kicked myself for not having thought of it first. No one had taught me such gallant manners down the river in my village.

The evening might easily have seemed like a moment removed from the twentieth century. This landed aristocracy had survived wars, revolutions, social upheavals, and Nazi mayhem. But aside from their gracious manner of living, the zu Lowen-steins have been deeply involved in their times. On a bookshelf near the door, I noticed a first edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf. I opened it and found that the father of the present patriarch had penned marginal annotations, now faded, in old German script, such as Phrasert (empty words), which expressed his disapproval of the Austrian ex-corporal's politics.

After the war, the zu Lowensteins became one of the focal points for an active German-American friendship society. They have traveled extensively in the United States, and even today bemoan the departure of the American army. They belong to the war and immediate postwar generation of Germans that is deeply grateful for the American presence in Europe, for the civil society and the political stability we helped to create there. Toward the end of the evening, the prince produced a late sixteenth-century volume that described pre-colonial life in the New World We ended the evening poring over this tome and its lithographs. Accustomed as he was to an upper-class milieu, Bernie had moved through the evening with great ease.

We said our good-byes after breakfast the next morning. Our host opened his gate and directed us out into the traffic in the direction of Berlin. Through the rearview mirror, we saw him wave farewell to us with large gestures so characteristic of this generous spirit.

We organized our stay in Berlin with the help of two friends, an “East” German artist and a “West” German physician. To a great extent we depended on our friends, with their disparate political ideologies, to show us parts of the city they thought would interest us.

Our physician friend, Manuela Bayer, showed us the side of West Berlin that we all have known as the “showcase of democracy” during the years of the cold war. Bernie had not experienced Berlin as the divided city it then was. At one point he asked us whether a small retaining wall we passed by was a remnant of the Berlin Wall, not realizing how massive the cut through the middle of the city had been. But since his first view of Berlin was untrammeled by the major effects the cold war had had on it, he gained a much clearer view of the present-day metropolis and its progress toward the future than we did, caught as we were with our experiences of the city during its period of postwar division.

We decided to visit Plotzensee, the high-walled prison where Germans who had opposed Nazism were murdered. It is a stark place, hidden away and hard to find, and very much in line with the understated approach Germany takes today in speaking of Germans who resisted Nazism. It is widely known that the failed coup against Hitler of July 1944 led to the execution of the conspirators. Less well known is that more than sixteen thousand people were sentenced to death for political resistance and treason against the Third Reich from 1933 until the end of the war. About a quarter of them were hanged or beheaded at Plotzensee in a chamber that looks like a wholesale butcher shop with its iron hooks and troughs to catch the blood.³

Bernie and I lingered a long time over the official Nazi documents pertaining to a particular German housewife who had merely expressed a personal dislike for Hitler. She had been denounced by a neighbor. After a trial and several appeals, on display at the museum, she was condemned to die and was guillotined at Plotzensee. Almost wordlessly, the four of us made our way through this prison, as did a handful of other visitors. To date there is no morally convincing narrative about Germans as victims of Nazism, because such a narrative might sound like an attempt at balancing the scales. Our German guide, Manuela, stayed in the background during this part of our return to the past. It had not been her recommendation to visit Plotzensee, but mine, with Bernie in agreement.

In digging up the ground and removing the last debris left over from the final battles of World War II at the center of Berlin a few years earlier, the Germans had unearthed the SS Headquarters and had converted them into a permanent exhibit called Topographie des Terrors. As we approached the museum, Bernie discovered that his ever-present glasses case, with his glasses in it, was missing. We had joked about the funny red case and the dime store reading glasses before, but now he seemed very upset, almost panicked over their loss. Everything stopped while we retraced our steps and finally discovered them under the table in the restaurant where we had eaten lunch. I realized how very hard on him it was to lose anything—in this case, something he needed right away.

We entered the Topographie des Terrors at the so-called Prinz Albrecht Site, where the remains of the Gestapo, SS, and Reich Security Main Office are located. On the walls of the restored cells, Nazi crimes are documented by photographs of victims and victimizers, documents ordering mass executions, and posters of anti-Semitic propaganda. We made our way slowly through the extensive underground labyrinth. One photograph showed Hungarian Jews being transported to Auschwitz in summer 1944. Two boys —who could have been the Rosner brothers — in heavy coats, with dark caps drawn over their ears, stared back at us with frightened faces. I was stunned by its obvious evocation of my friend's past. But, to my surprise, Bernie passed by it without showing any special interest. This black-and-white image, fixed on white museum walls, didn't stimulate a memory or a response; it provided no emotional bridge to the past for this survivor. If anything, it seemed to draw him, the onlooker, and the boys in the picture apart. I asked him about his apparent disinterest in this photograph later, and he replied with one word, “Overload.”

We came to a picture of Adolf Eichmann that showed the very same four stars on his lapel that Bernie had drawn for me in his living room in northern California. Bernie stared at this photograph and then announced, “He patted me on the head in Tab when he was there.” Sally and I knew what he was talking about, but our German friend looked puzzled. I told her the story of Eichmann's visit to Tab in spring 19/14 and how Bernie had come face-to-face with Hitler's notorious henchman, who called him “Kleiner Bube.” I don't think Manuela understood what she was hearing.

Bernie spent the most time in front of a document that spelled out in detail for the top SS echelon the “logistics problems” a high-ranking SS officer had disposing of the corpses of more than a thousand Lithuanian Jews whom he and his troops had executed. Bernie has always been more interested in Heinrich Himmler than in Hitler, since Himmler claimed to the British army after his capture and before his suicide not to have known about the systematic extermination of the Jews. But here in this exhibit, Bernie came across proof that Himmler was lying, in the form of this Lithuanian SS officer's report. He moved up close to the exhibit and read every line. His satisfaction was evident, and he often came back to this point later—an authentic Nazi document in a German museum that constituted irrefutable evidence of Himmler s knowledge of the genocide.

I had always thought that Bernie's worry about these surrealistic claims of innocence by the upper echelon of the Nazi hierarchy, or even the contemporary extremists' claims that German extermination camps did not exist, represented one of his few irrational streaks. But I began to realize that the extraordinary nature of the Holocaust makes it seem incredible on the face of it, and thus open to exploitation by neo-Nazis. The huge discrepancy between the unprecedented horrors in Auschwitz and the apparent normalcy of the German everyday before and after the Nazi years leaves room for the ill-willed to spin their delusionary yarns.

We emerged from this subterranean realm of past Nazi tortures squinting in the bright sunny day. Not far away was a large, fenced-in area that appeared to be an old construction site, with pieces of broken concrete strewn about in the weeds. Why was such prime real estate in the heart of Berlin abandoned? It turned out to be the location of Hitler's bunker, and the Germans didn't know what to do with it. I suggested that perhaps the memorial to Nazi victims, so hotly debated in Berlin, should be erected on it. Bernie suggested with irony that perhaps a plaque be installed at the location that read, “Adolf Hitler slept here.” He made it increasingly clear during the trip that he was suspicious of any continued collective breast-beating about Germany's past crimes. For him, it was the reverse of the collective hatred once directed against the Jews; to attribute collective guilt to all living Germans was to do the same thing Hitler had done to the Jews. I knew that this had not always been Bernie s attitude; rather, it had evolved over time. In 1956, for instance, after he learned about the Czech “ethnic cleansing” of Sudeten Germans, he remembers having commented sarcastically to Charles Merrill, “It couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch.”

But the question remained: what should “the Germans do with the grassy piece of real estate that covers the remnants of Hitler's bunker? Should they dig it up to see what they find? We finally agreed that we would sell this prime property to the highest bidder, who could then erect on it whatever he saw fit-hotel, restaurant, tennis club, or amusement park. Our German friend did not venture an opinion.

We then drove to the Potsdamer Platz, the largest construction site in Europe, where history unfolds before your eyes. A forest of cranes marked the horizon of this cityscape. Huge machines in motion, they swung in all directions, giving Berlin an aura of determination and unbounded energy. None of us had ever seen anything like it. Mountains of excavated earth, cement, and building materials were piled up everywhere. A network of dirt roads provided access to various sites for heavy vehicles. Groundwater was being pumped out of cavernous holes; office buildings were going up everywhere, with edifices for Mercedes and Sony leading the way. Huge buildings to house the federal government, scheduled to move to Berlin, were being constructed and old buildings renovated. An entire metropolis was being reconstructed and the contours of a nation changed. You could sense that this new capital not too far from the Polish border was far to the east of Bonn. It remained to be seen what this new seat of power would mean for the future of Germany and of Europe.

Manuela told us about the recent concert that celebrated this new beginning in the heart of Germany, when Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic performed Haydn's “Creation,” the mass celebrating the biblical story of Genesis. The orchestra and concert-goers had been seated right in the middle of this enormous construction area. Our German friend was critical of the event, saying that this so-called beginning had little to do with her Germany but much to do with Mercedes, Sony, and other international corporations that were footing the bill for the monumental enterprise, including the musical performance. Bernie defended these investments for the future of Germany and Europe. He found the financial support of the corporate sponsors for the concert a brilliant idea. After all, as he concluded, hadn't it always been the rich who contributed to great art that benefited everyone? Renaissance culture could not have flourished without its wealthy patrons. Today's wealthy and powerful, moreover, have brought benefits to many more layers of society than did the elites who ruled the Italian Renaissance cities.

We climbed the stairs to the top of the Info Box, a temporary observation platform from which we could see all of Berlin's center. Computer screens provided a view of how the city will look when construction plans are completed. Also visible from this vantage point were remnants of the Berlin Wall that reminded us of the Iron Curtain that had split Germany and Europe into two parts. History crowds in on this old divide, juxtaposed to the new and not yet born: Hitler's bunker, the SS chamber of horrors, the old Reichstag building, with its turbulent early-twentieth-century history, and, nearby, the Museum of Modern Art, which during our visit housed an exhibition that included precious works from as far away as St. Petersburg and New York. Architectural monumentalism in the heart of Berlin is inescapable, and given the amount of reconstruction, unavoidable.

Ancient Rome, with its many archaeological layers, was for Sigmund Freud a metaphor of the human psyche. Contemporary Berlin, with all of its demolition, sifting of debris, covering over and building up, appeared to us as a metaphor of modern history.

The following morning, the three of us took the subway to the enormous Alexanderplatz, the largest square in Berlin, to meet our East German guide, Ursula Strozynski, who was well connected to the grassroots artists' colony that flourishes in East Berlin. When we got off our train, we asked two uniformed police officers with a fierce-looking Doberman in tow how to get to the Weltuhr (world clock)—our meeting place. They were happy to give us directions. As we emerged onto the windy square, I asked Bernie whether these police brought back memories of other German police and other guard dogs. Not at all, he replied, with characteristic rationality. He had no problem seeing these contemporary German police as his protectors.

We walked through the working-class neighborhoods not far from the Alexanderplatz with Ursula. Well versed in the current debates about the representation of the past in the new Berlin, she proudly held on to her socialist creed and the moral conviction that Germans should try to “reexperienee,” as intensely as possible, the suffering the Nazis caused their victims, particularly the Jews. Although we detected some of the prefabricated slogans of the socialist past in her speech, we were nevertheless taken by her goodwill as she opened our eyes to some of the subtler cultural differences between what used to be East and West Berlin.

We wandered through streets with sooty brick facades, broken windows and peeling paint, dingy back alleys, courtyards, and weed-filled lots strewn with abandoned junk. Our artist guide saw in run-down things the traces of human activities and of times past that needed to be recalled. For her, this kind of respect for the past was a moral imperative. She related with pride the struggle of the Communists against the Nazis that took place in these streets in the early 1930s.

She then led us to the Beth Café in the Tucholskystraße, a Jewish restaurant that served simple kosher food. To prevent attacks by neo-Nazis, a German police officer stood guard outside the entrance of the modest establishment. Few customers patronized the café, perhaps because the food was mediocre and served by a glum waitress. Some of the other guests probably were tourists, too. All of us, perhaps with the exception of our German friend, would rather have eaten somewhere else. When the four of us left, the police officer no longer stood immediately outside the door but had repositioned himself at the corner a short distance up the street. From this discrete new vantage point, however, he continued to keep a watchful eye on the café. The Beth Café seemed to symbolize a Jewish way of life that no longer existed in Berlin, and what we ate seemed more like “virtual food” of an age that had been erased in Germany. Some things are irrevocably lost, and all the goodwill of those left behind is of no avail to recover them.

With one particular sight, however, Ursula managed to build a bridge between us and her way of seeing things. She led us to a well-kept playground, with sandboxes, swings, and slides, in the Koppenplatz, a quiet residential square. A short distance from the playground stands a bronze memorial consisting of an old kitchen table, one chair placed at the table, and another chair nearby, toppled over onto its back. These everyday objects in somewhat larger-than-life size invite the visitor to sit or lean on them while pondering their meaning—a simple scene that has been violently interrupted. A family argument? An interrogation? A deportation? The four of us wove stories to fit the evocative sculpture. Bernie said that his parents had had a table just like this one back home in Tab, and Ursula told us that the kitchen table in her present house in Pankow was also of the same type. Here we all found emotional access to an unnamed act of violence.

Our East German friend described some of the heated debates among German intellectuals, politicians, and artists that surrounded the construction of monuments to the past, especially to the Holocaust. She believed that those who were for pompous, large monuments only wanted to assuage their consciences. Bernie agreed, remarking that the simple tableau of the disrupted kitchen touched him deeply. He felt it to be a more eloquent symbol of the human devastation wrought by the Nazi terror than any monumental memorial could ever be. Size, he said, shouldn't be assumed necessarily to reflect the degree of guilt of those who erected a particular monument. An increasing number of Germans opposed the construction of a huge Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin for another reason. They simply didn't want to have a monument to the greatest crime in the country's history in the center of the capital.

In the late afternoon, we parted from Ursula and boarded a streetcar. We moved to the back as it pulled away from the stop, and we looked out the window to see our artist friend running full speed around the corner. What was her hurry? To finish one of her paintings of somber urban cityscapes in her atelier? To catch up with the future that the “East” Germans still defined differently for themselves than the more jaundiced “West” Germans? On our way back to the Kurfürstendam, Bernie observed that in the half-hidden corners of the eastern side of Berlin lies an inventive spirit that will well serve the Germany to come. At first, I was surprised to hear this from my staunchly capitalist friend, but then he has a keen eye for potentials, no matter what their political context. Finally, he turned to us with an amused smile on his face and said how glad he was to have recently invested some money in the New Germany mutual fund.

I had been apprehensive about introducing Bernie to Germany. After all, there was more to this common trip to Germany than Bernie's reciprocity for our visit to Tab, Hungary, in 1990. He had avoided this part of Europe for decades, although his frequent travels to neighboring countries brought him close many times. Throughout our trip, Bernie was engrossed in what he saw and heard, yet somehow quite self-absorbed and contemplative. I wondered whether part of his easygoing interaction with the Germans he met was the learned response of someone who liked to be accommodating and who had learned to be a polite guest. I also knew that he shied away from conflicts and that his training and personality gave him a reserve that prevented him from expressing his feelings spontaneously or with hyperbole.

A year and a half after our trip, Bernie articulated his position about Germany in a speech to a German organization of businesspeople, academicians, government representatives, and other professionals (Wirtschaftsgilde) who have been meeting for more than forty years to discuss the social and ethical implications of the German post—World War II market economy. During their annual midwinter meeting, we were invited to read and discuss excerpts from our memoirs in light of the ongoing debate in Germany about adequate forms of remembering (and memorializing) the Holocaust. In carefully articulated phrases, and speaking slowly so that this largely bilingual German audience would understand his English, Bernie made his key points: “I want to be as open and forthright as I can What do I think of Germans and Germany? I totally! reject the concept of mass and national guilt Everyone, not just Germans, should be aware of the first signs of a drift toward the abyss, and stand up against it.”

While the differentiation he made between guilt and responsibility is known, what made this moment so important for everyone present was the fact that in the audience were former members of the German World War II military. Bernie was the first concentration camp survivor most of them had ever met. At the conclusion of his speech, the audience sat in stunned silence, not knowing whether it was appropriate to applaud. The brutal fact of Nazi crimes had come home in the form of an individual victim standing before them who appeared, not as an accuser, but as one who sketched in the simplest terms a blueprint for civilized behavior that should guide us all.

Even days after our presentation, conversations with conferees frequently drifted back to Bernie's speech. I was touched by how the participants, all of whom were highly successful in their careers and most of whom had developed a sense of their own worth during the period of Germany's postwar reconstruction, were receptive and ready to communicate about their past. Our presentation opened up a way for many of them to tell their individual and family stories. One man in his sixties stood out for me. His father had been an SS bureaucrat in Prague, selecting Czechs for slave labor in the German war machine. After the war, a Czech court sentenced his father to life imprisonment without parole. The son of the storyteller (the grandson of the war criminal) is at present politically active in a German antifascist organization. While the family history of this successful German businessman is extreme, to a lesser degree many members of the audience shared the fate of having lived between two radically different times and between two generations with radically different political beliefs. As a catalyst for bridge building and open sharing of the past, throughout this conference Bernie embodied his often-expressed faith in rational, civilized behavior.